In lesson 5, I share insights on creativity that elude many who start down the path of writing. Not knowing them can cause a lot of frustration and convince writers to quit. Don’t be frustrated. You’re going to learn:
Here it is: Lesson 5: How do you get and develop ideas?
Enjoy!
If you feel a bit lost or anxious about how to teach narrative for the new core, especially stories, I think I can help.
I’m an educator in the private sector and an award-winning novelist and short story writer. I’ve been teaching authors in various venues how to write for the last five years. I’ve been on writing podcasts with thousands of listeners, taught at a number of writers conventions, and had a series of articles published by the national Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America organization, an organization for professional authors. I’ve also been helping Nellie, my wonderful wife, teach her 7th and 8th grade language arts students the unit on short stories during that same period. We’ve taught it to twenty different classes and picked up a number of important insights along the way.
This last year I couldn’t help but examine all the materials Nellie brought home during the district’s writing program adoption investigations. Some programs looked very promising; others not so much. Some got some things about writing flat out wrong. Most of the programs had gaps.
Furthermore, because I work with so many people wanting to write, I know that it’s difficult to teach if you really don’t understand what stories really are and how they work. For lots of people, the subject matter can seem impenetrable. And yet writing stories is such a wonderful way to teach writing, especially because so many kids love it. You won’t find a kid who will spend extra hours writing a business letter or poem analysis, but you will find quite a few who will go crazy writing stories. And the whole time they’re practicing their writing skills.
The question is how DO you write a story?
What is a story?
How can you tell if it’s good?
How do you come up with ideas?
Where do you start?
And what the heck is this chart? Do writers really use this? (Not many that I know.)
And does anyone think changing the diagram to look like Aspen, Colorado actually helps?
Hey, students—please make your story look like Aspen, Colorado! (Yeah, that’s going to be effective.)
And yet it’s not as difficult as it appears. Nellie and I have seen a lot of kids really get into writing stories. We’ve seen kids WILLINGLY going way beyond the assignment to write stories that are eight, twelve, twenty-five plus pages. And as they’re writing, they’re practicing grammar, spelling, structure, vocabulary, etc. without knowing it and having a great time. I know that if you enable your students, many of them will write, write, write. Especially in grade school. But also in the higher grades.
Stories can be a blast. The assignments can connect to many students. And the results can be wonderful. I’ve laughed out loud at some of the stories coming out of Nellie’s class. Others have been enjoyable on other levels.
But for this to work in your class, you need to know some key things. You need to understand the core of story and the story development process. You need a lesson plan that details everything step-by-step so your students don’t flounder. And you need to know some fundamental tips (secrets?) about teaching this content.
So I’m going to hold this day-long class for you. A full eight hours. And share everything Nellie and I have learned. This class will be for teachers at ALL levels (I’ll show you some ways to scale the complexity of what you’re doing). There will be NO cost. The only thing you have to bring is a pencil, paper, whatever program materials you have, and a willingness to have a good time.
When we finish, you will know how to write a simple story like the ones your students will write because, ta-dum, you will write one! AND you’ll have a step-by-step lesson plan that builds on whatever materials you have—an official program or one of your own. AND you’ll understand story better than 99% of the population. AND you’ll have a bundle of techniques to help your students. AND you’ll solve both world peace and maybe the lost sock conundrum.
Truly, I think that instead of feeling stress, you’ll actually be looking forward to teaching and writing stories with your students. If not, you may bring tomatoes and huck them at me, but please be aware that I will not stand still; to find satisfaction, you will have to be able to hit a moving target.
If you’re interested, just click the Contact John link under my photo in the left sidebar and send me an email letting me know.
Hope to see you in class!
GET READY FOR A FUN DAY OF LEARNING!
Topic: Teaching writing (narrative & the common core)
Who: Teachers (and writers at least 18 years old), seats are limited
When: Monday, July 29th, 8:15 AM – 5:00 PM
Where: Rich Middle School, 54 E 100 S Laketown, UT 84038
Materials you need to bring:
AGENDA
8:15 AM Arrive
8:30 AM – 9:20 AM
9:30 AM – 10:20 AM
10:30 – 11:20
LUNCH
12:00 – 12:50
1:00 – 1:50
2:00 – 2:50
3:00 – 3:50
4:00 – 4:50
Meghan Cox Gurdon wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Stree Journal called “Darkness Too Visible” in which she complained that it was hard to find young adult fiction these days that isn’t filled with coarse, dark material–profanity, pederasty, mutilation, etc. She claims that “contemporary fiction for teens is rife with explicit abuse, violence and depravity” and wonders “why is this considered a good idea?” She concludes by saying:
So it may be that the book industry’s ever-more-appalling offerings for adolescent readers spring from a desperate desire to keep books relevant for the young. Still, everyone does not share the same objectives. The book business exists to sell books; parents exist to rear children, and oughtn’t be daunted by cries of censorship. No family is obliged to acquiesce when publishers use the vehicle of fundamental free-expression principles to try to bulldoze coarseness or misery into their children’s lives.
This, of course, sent hordes of folks into a frenzy of posts sneering at Gurdon’s so-called prissy sensibilities, decrying censorship, and extolling the virtues of young adult literature and dark material in particular. For example, Mary Elizabeth Williams in a Salon piece called “Has young adult fiction become too dark?” rolls her eyes, then deigns to wade into what’s she thinks is an obviously juvenile argument to apparently show Gourdon how “stupid” she really is. Williams concludes:
One of the terrific side effects of an obviously click-baiting piece of editorial twaddle like Gurdon’s is that it reminds people how many fellow passionate readers there are in the world. That incendiary WSJ piece promptly sparked a tear-jerkingly beautiful twitter #YA saves trend full of heartfelt reactions and links to outstandingly reasoned, article responses from well-read adults and teens on the value within so much of YA literature and its downright lifesaving effects.
Williams suggests fiction doesn’t have the power to lead people into bad behaviors. After all, she assures us, “an entire generation of women managed to devour the ‘Flowers in the Attic’ series without having sex with their brothers.” No, according to Williams (and all the #YAsaves folks), YA fiction only saves lives. And she provides a link to prove it.
But Williams misses the mark. Completely. This isn’t about whether fiction has power to influence us in good and bad ways. There’s a huge body of research on media effects which clearly proves fiction’s power for both. Nor is it about the theraputic uses of dark material.
The heart of the matter revolves around a rather mundane thing–customer service and marketing.
Gurdon and those parents she describes in her article want a certain type of entertainment. For years, YA fiction has provided that type of entertainment. But things have changed, and the YA label isn’t reliable to them any more. It’s like someone who has purchased steel cut oatmeal for years is now suddenly bringing the bags home to find them filled with sardines or, horrors, Twinkies.
We can argue the merits of sardines and Twinkies. And a hundred other foods. We can argue the merits of certain types of stories for certain types of readers. And my metaphor above–maybe you think using Twinkies is unfair; maybe you would have wanted me to use something like Triscuts or Wheat Thins. But that’s all beside the point.
The real problem here is that the publishers have ignored a significant segment of the market who want to buy books but can’t find the types they’re interested in. Either the covers and blurb material don’t help them find what they’re looking for, sometimes misleading them, or the publishers have simply made the mistake of not thinking about this segment of the reading market.
The fix is easy. (1) Produce more books for these folks. (2) Label your books in a way that makes it easy for the consumer to find what they want. They’re not asking for censorship. They’re asking for a nutrition label that lets them know what they’re getting. Publishers can do what the movie and gaming industries have done with rating systems that prominently display on the cover. Or use some other method. This isn’t a moral issue, it’s simply a matter of helping the right customers find your good or service. It’s a matter of good marketing and branding.
And I would think, with the upheavals in the book industry today, that publishers and booksellers would want to do whatever they could to boost sales. Surely it doesn’t help to turn customers away because your package is confusing them.
In the meantime, the battle will rage and this simple practical core of the issue will be lost in the fires and clouds of smoke produced by the arguments extolling and excoriating the virtues and vices of fiction.
Sometimes it feels like there are a thousand things to remember when writing a story. New writers who make lists of these things soon begin to drown in them. But I’ve come to realize that many of these “rules” don’t matter.
They don’t matter because many ignore the function of story. This makes it impossible to know how and when to apply them, or if they’re even something you should apply in the first place. Furthermore, a good number that do tie back to function often have little impact.
In fact, the more I write, the more I believe the Pareto Principle applies to writing–a few vital factors make up most of the effect. The key is to focus on a limited number of fundamentals. To focus on these things that matter most. The things that produce the biggest bang for the buck.
So what really matters when you’re writing a story?
That all depends on what you’re trying to do. Form follows function.
So what is the function, the objective?
First of all, it’s something that happens in the reader. Readers buy stories because they provide a service, they do something to the reader, guide them into an experience. In this series, I take a look at what I think is one of the core elements of the story experience and identify the Pareto factors for delivering it to the reader.
That story core, or at least a huge part of it, is suspense.
Man goes out and turns on his sprinklers. They hiss to life. He scratches his bum, looks at the rising sun, goes back inside, and nothing more happens.
You want to pay me money for that one? Want to make it into a movie? It’s a story.
Yeah, it’s a story alright, you may say, but who cares?
Okay, so maybe while he’s scratching his bum, a guy with a gun slips in the back. The intruder points the gun at the man’s daughter who is standing by the toaster buttering her bread. She’s a teenager, dressed in cutoffs and hiking boots. The intruder says, “Your father is going to be coming back through that door any time now. You’re going to call him into the kitchen. We’re going to have a chat. You two didn’t finish the business we talked about.”
The girl only has a butter knife, but she grips it tighter, considers that only 13% of shots fired by cops in gunfights hit home. This was drilled into her by her firearms instructor. The guys who are trained only hit 13% of the time. It’s that low even though most gunfights start with the opponents standing only six feet away from each other–the distance between her and Gideon with his gun. That’s what happens when the adrenaline takes over. But Gideon doesn’t look like he’s full of adrenaline. He looks like a man going to a BBQ. So maybe he has a 40% chance with each bullet. That still gives her 60.
The front door opens. It distracts Gideon for just a moment. The barrel of his gun moves slightly to the left.
It’s not a story yet, but it’s more interesting. And it’s more interesting because that second version generated something the first one never could. What it generated, dear Reader, was a little rise of hope, fear, and curiosity–a little suspense.
After finishing draft 3 of CURSE OF A DARK GOD, I needed a break. So I reviewed my notes of DARK GOD’S GLORY, debriefed the many things I learned this last year about novels and story (and, oh boy, was it a year for learning), wrote up my “Ideal Novel” document, and then began to study structure and suspense. It’s been a wonderful and fruitful month.
I think I’ve found some clarity and solidified a number of Pareto factors for suspense. Let me share my current thoughts on the subject. (Interestingly enough, the Writing Excuses guys just did a podcast on this subject: 5.4: Creating Suspense. You might want to check it out.)
Because form follows function, let’s start with the end in mind.
In the stories we love, the stories we stay up late at night for, the ones for which we pay $25.99 in hardback, the ones we willingly spend hours of our life on, those stories very frequently put the reader into a state of hoping and fearing for a character. This starts as curiosity and quickly moves to sympathy. Very often it builds to an edge-of-your-seat worry that continues up to the end of the novel. At that point the reader experiences a cathartic release.
When we talk about suspense, this is what I believe we’re talking about. And a key thing to remember is that the tension we’re after is not something that’s in the text. It’s something the text builds IN the reader. So you may have massive explosions, deaths, chases, escapes, villains, and all the hordes of hell combine in your story, in the text, but that does not mean the story has dramatic tension. Because dramatic tension is a READER concept. You may have a relatively quite scene where a child is doing nothing more than swinging at a park, but because the reader knows the child molester has just arrived and the park is empty, the scene creates dramatic tension. The girl feels no tension. She’s just swinging away. But the reader’s tension goes through the roof. It’s all about what happens in the READER.
So the question is what key factors of a story guide the reader into this dramatic tension?
Well, we first need to understand what’s involved with this tension. What’s it made of? I came across a lovely *discussion of this last month in David Howard’s How to Build a Great Screenplay and have adapted it to my use. In emotional terms, we HOPE and FEAR for a character. “We don’t know what WILL happen, but we know [or suspect] what MIGHT happen, and therefore feel tension about those possibilities” (p52).
Notice the key ideas:
So what makes us hope or fear for someone? What makes us uncertain of an outcome?
I see vital ingredients, key conditions in three of the four parts of story—problem, character, and plot. In this blog I’ll discuss the Pareto factors for suspense I see working in problem. In following posts, I’ll identify those I see in character and plot.
Form follows function, so what types of problems lead to us hoping and fearing for a character?
When I look back at the stories I love that produce this effect in me, I see three main types of problems. I’ve talked about these before.
In this type of problem, there’s a danger or threat to some aspect of the character’s happiness that is significant enough that the READER can sympathize.
With these problems we HOPE the character avoids or eliminates the danger, but we FEAR they may not. There are many aspects of happiness that might be threatened or in danger. I’ve listed below those that raise my FEAR and would raise my fear for someone else. I’ve stated them in first person, but you can think about them in third.
In these situations my life is in danger or threatened. People are out to kill me (HUNGER GAMES); I’m going to starve or freeze to death (“TO BUILD A FIRE”); there’s a shark in the water who would like a taste (JAWS).
My security and physical well-being is in danger or threatened. These include all sorts of situations where bullies threaten me with violence or where I might be maimed in some way. Or I begin to lose some vital function—sight, hearing, speech, my ability to think, etc.
In these situations my inclusion in a group is threatened. My love, friendship, relationship, feeling of belonging or of being valued are endangered. For example, I’m ostracized by a group, shunned, discriminated against. Or maybe my girlfriend begins to look at other men and I fear losing her, or my son and I become estranged and I fear losing him. This can even be a physical separation like in TAKEN (daughter kidnapped for the slave trade) or NOT WITHOUT MY DAUGHTER (daughter kidnapped by husband).
In these situations my sense of fulfillment of doing something worthwhile is in danger. I’m threatened with a life of drudgery. You can see this at work in the beginning of THE INCREDIBLES where Bob, Mr. Incredible, has to work in a deadening insurance office. But it might be someone whose future or ability to do things that are meaningful to them is being threatened. For example, a boy who desperately wants to play the piano has his piano and is forced to do something else.
Anything threatening our freedom. It might be slavery or blackmail or government control or a number of other things.
In these situations my ability to retain and use my possessions is threatened. Any time something precious is stolen from me, my happiness is affected.
These are the main aspects of happiness I’ve identified that seem significant enough to raise fears. If you think you know another, please post a comment.
In this type of problem, a character has a lack of and opportunity for some aspect of happiness that is significant enough that the READER can sympathize. These are often about characters in some kind of hardship. The lacks, hardships, and opportunities all have to do with the same aspects of happiness as listed above. In these situations we HOPE the character is able to fill the lack; we HOPE they will be able to grasp this opportunity for happiness. But we also FEAR they will fail.
If you think about love stories, these are all stories of lack/opportunity. She’s alone, without a lover, or a satisfying and loving relationship, and she meets someone. Suddenly, she has an opportunity for happiness. As readers we immediately began to hope she will find that relationship wonderfulness and fear she might not.
In the movie OCTOBER SKY a young boy lives in a coal mining community. But it’s not his thing. He suddenly gets an opportunity at school to do something with science. This is his ticket to doing something meaningful. We HOPE he doesn’t miss it, but we FEAR he might.
A character encounters a mystery that is significant enough that the READER can sympathize or feel curiosity about it.
The first two types of problems center on happiness. They raise suspense and sympathy and worry in the reader. This last type of problem centers more on raising curiosity in the reader. We HOPE the character solves the mystery because we want to know the answer as well, but we FEAR they might not.
Very often these types of problem are paired with some aspect of happiness. The vast majority of murder mysteries, cop stories, and courtroom dramas do this. In fact, many happiness problems are paired with mysteries and puzzles.
Let’s go back up to the objective. We want to HOPE and FEAR for the character. We don’t know what WILL happen but suspect or know what MIGHT and we worry and feel tension about the possibilities. We want to worry, and we want that worry to build to a pitch. We then want to experience a cathartic release.
How will we FEAR if the problem is so easy anybody could fix it? How will we WORRY if the lead has all the odds stacked in his or her favor? How will we feel UNCERTAIN if we know exactly what’s going to occur?
I can’t worry for Frodo, for example, if all he has to do is cast the naughty ring into the pit of doom that lies on the other side of his street. I can’t worry about a guy finding a girl to love and who will love him, and have that worry build to a sharp edge-of-your-seat point, if all he has to do is proclaim his feelings and the girl immediately rushes to him forever.
The facts are that we won’t feel fear, worry, or uncertainty unless the problem is HARD to solve. I’ll discuss the Pareto factors for making problems hard when I talk about plot.
Besides being hard, problems need to be urgent. I’ve identified four factors that seem to intensify the nature of the problem: probability, immediacy, significance, and specificity.
It’s one thing to face the one-in-a-gazillion chance that I might be trampled by a herd of elephants when I walk out of the door. It’s quite another to know that the last seven people who walked out of the door were killed by the madman with the AK-47 sitting at the end of the hall.
The higher the probability of the threat or loss of opportunity, the more intense the problem becomes because it’s more likely I’ll lose. No probability and I have nothing to FEAR.
It’s one thing to know an asteroid will hit the earth and kill us all in 7,000 years. It’s quite another to know it will hit in three days.
The more immediate the problem, the less likely I’ll be able to solve it. The less likely my chances are, the more I’ll WORRY. Give us 2,000 years, and I’m sure we’ll figure out the asteroid thing. Give us three days, and that’s probably cutting it too close. This is why setting up a time limit, a ticking clock or ticking time-bomb, can ratchet up the audience’s tension. Of course, it has to be a short time limit. You can’t start the bomb ticking, and give the lead 45 years to disarm it.
We talked about this before. It’s one thing to face the kidnapping of my pet spider. It’s quite another to face the kidnapping of my child. Significance increases when more is put at risk.
The more significant the threat or opportunity, the more invested I become. The more I FEAR to lose.
It’s one thing to say that something bad is going to happen. It’s quite another to know that kidnappers are going to cut your finger off with a pair of wire dikes. It’s one thing to have someone say something good will happen (Chinese fortune cookie) and quite another to say your uncle just died and left you a million dollars, but you have to fight your three cousins for it.
The more specific the problem, the easier it is for us to see the specific possibilities and react to them with HOPE and FEAR. Generalities don’t trigger emotions. Striking snakes do, though. As do garbage disposals that are turned on just when you reach in to get the baby’s pacifier.
Another part of this is to make the threat specific to the hero. It’s one thing to say a lot of people in the United States or Russia or India are going to die. It’s another to say the hero will lose his own child or wife in the event. In fact, the loss of one child can make the problem more intense that the loss of thousands.
This is not to say you can’t write about threats to large groups of people. That’s one of the ways to broaden the scope of the problem and make it more significant. It’s just that problems become more intense the closer they comes to home. Things that threaten us personally, or those we love, raise more fears than those that threaten people we don’t know. A flood raging in the next county is different than the one coming down our street. So in story, the more personal you make the threat to the person we’ve invested in, the more intense the threat will be.
Supporting all of this hope, fear, and worry is the fact that the reader is uncertain of the outcome. The character must have a chance to solve the problem up until the end, but for no extended period of time can it look like winning or losing is assured, because the moment the reader can predict the ending and the major turns along the way, that’s the moment they will lose interest.
Think about this. It’s the first quarter of a football game, and the score is 64 to 0. Anybody sticking around for that one to play out?
No, you can predict the ending. Why watch? Predictability kills hope, fear, and worry. It kills interest.
So how do we make sure the reader is uncertain of the outcome?
First, as stated before, we make the problem hard to solve. We’ll get into more specifics during the post on plot, but we make the problem harder to solve by giving our characters limitations, putting them into ongoing and continuing troubles, and making them face conflict with their own competing desires, other people in the story, and the setting.
But there’s another ingredient. The second thing we do is introduce surprise. Surprise is one of the vital elements in story making precisely because it makes things unpredictable. It makes hope, fear, worry, and curiosity possible.
There are two forms the surprise takes. The first is surprising or new limitations, troubles, and conflicts. New twists to the problem.
Maybe we’ve seen lots of stories about assassins who need to go behind enemy lines. But what if we add a surprising conflict. What if our character is asked to sneak in and kill his sister? Or his mother? Or his best friend? Or the teacher he loves?
What if our lead is not a highly-skilled CIA operative, but a child who has been trained for this, and not as a suicide bomber? Or a grandmother with no training at all who is forced into the situation? What if the person she is supposed to kill isn’t in enemy territory but a religious leader or someone in our own government?
Do you see? You simply twist the elements of the problem in new ways. While the situation may be similar, it’s not the exact same thing they’ve seen before, and so it prevents them from predicting how things will unfold. While they suspect what MIGHT happen, then don’t know what WILL happen.
The next type of surprise is to simply introduce a turn into the story the reader cannot foresee. Again, this relies on reader expectation. So the sidekick we’ve lead the reader to trust turns out to be a traitor. The tactic that the reader has seen work so many times in other stories fails right off the bat in your book. In fact, maybe the whole plan fails. The villain finds out about the child assassin in the beginning and when he shows up, they’re waiting.
Surprises give the story vital jolts of life. Set up a problem that has a new twist to it and give us some unexpected twists along the way during the plot.
Story problems are the engines that make stories go. They define where a story starts and when it ends. They do so because they generate hope, fear, worry, and curiosity. You might have great characters and a fabulous setting, but if your characters don’t face gnarly problems, readers will be unable to hope and fear for them. They will not worry. And they’ll soon tire of waiting for something to happen.
When I’m developing the central problem of my stories, I find the most exciting possibilities when I think of possible threats/dangers, lacks/opportunities, and mysteries. My ideas start to really crackle when I think of ways to make those problems harder, more urgent, and the outcome more uncertain. When I do this, I find I never have to worry about knowing what to write next. The problems beg for scenes.
It’s true that some delightful stories do not promise or deliver suspense and curiosity as their major delights. For example, in many mysteries, readers are not hoping and fearing as much as they are enjoying the character interactions or the humor. But even in those stories, hope, fear, and curiosity play a significant role. They often structure the novel.
The bottom line is that suspense over a character’s fate (hope, fear, and worry) or the answer to an involving question (curiosity) is one of the key things readers come to our stories for. And all that suspense starts with problem. However, it can’t end there because readers won’t worry for just anybody. You have to have characters they can get behind. In the next post in the series, I’ll write about a number of Pareto factors that naturally invest a reader in a character’s fate.
*These notes might expand. For right now I just want to share the full Howard quote.
“As we’ve seen, what the audience hopes for and what the characters hope for need not be the same thing. The same is true of our fears versus their fears. But how do hope and fear fit into the scheme of storytelling? Hope and fear are about the future. They derive from uncertaintly about future events in the story, future decisions the characters might make, future discoveries or revelations that might be unearthed, future outside forces and how they will influence the journey of the characters. When we discuss hope verusus fear in dramaturgical terms, this uncertainty is a function solely of the audience and its experience [my emphasis]. This is dramatic tension. We hope the man with the cobra in the shoe box won’t open the box; we fear he might and get himself or someone else bitten. We don’t know what will happen, but we know what might happen and therefore feel tension about those possibilities” (How to Build a Great Screenplay, 52).
From Russell Blake.
This does not represent the only way to do things, but it’s my way, and is the synthesis of everything I’ve learned over the last 23 months of self-publishing:
1) Pick one genre that’s popular and with which you are extremely familiar, and then write in that genre. Stick to it. Don’t hop around. It confuses your potential readers and muddies who you are in their minds, and will hurt your sales. If you want to write different genres, use a pseudonym, and if you like, let your readers know that moniker is you. But stick to one name, one genre, because you’re building your brand, and brand building is a function of clarity – clearly communicating what you do, and what your product is.
2) Write a series. Why? Because readers like series, and you want to give readers what they like. Or you won’t sell as much. You can try stand-alone – I have – but my series outsell my stand-alone books 4 to 1. Once you have at least three books in the series, make the first one free. Earn your income from the rest, but give readers a whole novel to decide whether they like you or not.
3) Write a lot. By that I mean try to write at least 3 novels a year. Don’t bother with short stories or novellas (40K or under) if you’re writing fiction – erotica, romance and non-fiction reportedly to do better with short form, but I don’t know from personal experience. Write 60-90K installments in your series, and release them AT MINIMUM every four months. Every three months would be better. Every two, better still. Momentum breeds success, and readers have short memories. The current market is a hungry animal, and you need to feed it, or risk being forgotten by the time your next one releases. Sorry. It’s the truth. And don’t start whining about how X famous author only puts out one book every Y years. If you’re Dan Brown and you sell tens of millions of novels each whack, then do whatever the hell you like. If you aren’t, listen up, or chock your strategy up to, “Become the next Dan Brown” and stop reading this drivel.
. . . .
5) Allocate time every day to write, and be disciplined. I suggest minimum one hour per day, or 1000 words. I actually ignore that and shoot for 5000-7000 a day when writing a novel, but that’s just my approach, and it’s not for everyone. My point is that you must be disciplined about your writing and develop that muscle. If you don’t make it a habit, you won’t write enough to put out one novel every four months, and you’ll already be way behind the curve.
6) Allocate time every day to market. I recommend a 75%/25% writing to marketing mix. So spend an hour writing every day, and fifteen-twenty minutes marketing (social media, blogging, interviews, message boards like this). Two hours writing, half hour to forty minutes marketing. And so on.
. . . .
13) Price competitively and intelligently. Look at your genre. Where are most books priced? Are you undervaluing/underpricing your work? Price to sell, but don’t go cheap, no matter what Locke or Hocking did years ago. Use low prices occasionally to move product, as promotional pricing. But price your product consistently with the rest of your peers. Over time, you can increase prices, if your product warrants it and your readership is willing to pay it. My advice here is don’t price too low, or too high.
. . . .
19) Have realistic goals. Look at what the average person does in their first year, and their second. That’s average. It ain’t pretty. If you want to be different than average in a good way, you need to do something better/different, and you need to make your own luck. Don’t get bummed because you haven’t been an overnight sensation. I sold $300 of novels in November, 2011, after six months of 15 hour days and seven releases. In December, 2011, I released five novels I’d been working on for months, to create a massive Xmas surge. I leaped to $1450. With a dozen books out. That’s not exactly a ton for the big Xmas season. But I continued writing as though my work was in hot demand. And I kept investing in my product, losing money, until it turned the corner and I started making decent money in Jan of 2012.
20) Book selling is a retail business, and retail businesses are promotions intense. You’re only going to be as good as your last, and next, promotion. Promotions are a necessary fact of life in retail. You have to generate noise – the product won’t do it by itself. There are millions of books out there. Yours are just more books. Figure out how to get some visibility. I won’t advise you on how – there are plenty of ‘experts’ that will charge you $5 for a book on what worked two years ago. Simply put, it’s constantly changing, so you need to experiment and push the envelope, share information with others and stay ahead of the curve. But if you aren’t promoting, you’re stalling. In business you’re either shrinking, or growing. If you aren’t promoting, chances are you aren’t growing.
There are 28 tips in all at “How to Sell Loads of Books.”
About this time last year I got the last of my rights back to the Dark God properties. I thought it would take twenty or thirty hours to figure out the whole indie publishing thing. And then the awesome John Brown story machine would kick in gear.
Reality promptly woke me up and slapped me around a bit. This last year has been quite the learning curve. Here’s what I’ve had to pick up:
One of the things I love about this business is that there is always more to learn. But I’m happy to be over that curve. For folks just starting out, let me share some of the resources I found super helpful with a number of the things listed above.
Posts by a mega indie-seller Russell Blake to give you the right perspective about indie publishing. I’ve read a lot of posts the last few years about being an indie author. These are the best I’ve come across.
Online courses to help you on the publishing side.
The most practical and clear-headed books about indie promotion I’ve read. For other clear-headed advice, see the Russell Blake posts above.
The most helpful book on copyright.
The most helpful book on copy editing as well as info to put into front and back matter.
Helpful threads on Kindle boards
Other great resources
Good luck!
Apply to take the next Novel Writers Academy course: How to Create Story Ideas That Beg To Be Written.
At the end of the six weeks you will be a story idea machine.
I will be working with only a small set of people. And so you need to apply to get in.
The deadline for applications is midnight, December 11th. So contact me now to get the application instructions.
A cracking good story idea requires five critical elements.
Until you have all five, you’ll struggle to plot. You’ll write a few scenes and run out of gas. You’ll feel like the story just isn’t going anywhere.
And that’s because it isn’t. It can’t. A story isn’t a story without all five elements.
However, once you develop these five things, your story will suddenly roar to life. There are a few other elements that are important as well, but these five things form the core of the story setup.
In this course you’re not going to merely learn about all of those story elements. You’re going to go deep and learn what can only be learned by actually doing the work and developing story idea after story idea with personal one-on-one feedback from someone who knows what they’re doing.
When you finish, you won’t just know story theory. You will be a story idea machine. And you will be that because you have put in the work. The right work.
Again, this is not a course full of lectures and videos. This is a course where you’re going to work. And develop the insights and skills that only come from doing the work.
You’re actually going to:
It’s going to:
You are going to learn how to develop killer story ideas on purpose instead of on accident. Which means you’ll be able to do again and again. Reliably. Like clockwork.
The focus of the class is not on learning about story, although you will do that. The majority of your time will be spent on developing stories.
You can’t become a carpenter by watching videos and reading books about it.
You have to get out on the work site, cut wood, and pound nails. You have to make the mistakes all beginning carpenters make, get feedback, and improve.
The same goes for writing.
And you’re going to work in this class. You develop 21 story setups. In fact, you develop more because the 21 are just the ones you turn into me. And with each one your skills, insights, and abilities grow.
In the beginning, your setups will be bare bones. By the end, they’ll be fully developed setups that beg to be written. Setups you can use to immediately write the first draft of your novel, whether that’s in outline or chapter form.
Here’s what you do each week.
Week 1.
Week 2.
Week 3.
Week 4.
Week 5.
Week 6.
In this class you develop story idea after story idea after story idea. You are going to be marinated in the work of developing characters, THOMs, goals, obstacles, settings, casts, and more. And because of that, each week will not only bring an explosion of insights, but new skills and abilities.
Every week you get two private, one-on-one, live sessions with me where you get encouragement and feedback on what you’ve developed. And you’ll have access to a private Facebook group where you can apply the principles to brainstorm even MORE ideas for each other’s stories.
At first you might feel a bit shy and worried about your ideas and abilities. But you’ll soon get over that. By the end of the course you’ll be one of those people that can generate terrific ideas easily. And you’ll be able to do that because you will have put in the work to become a different writer.
Hours of one-on-one instruction from a professional editor or author costs thousands of dollars. An MFA program can cost $25,000 to $30,000 or more!
But this course won’t cost anywhere close to that.
Plus you’re going to learn things here you’ll never get in an MFA program (I know. I was accepted into a top-ranked program).
The cost of this course is $799. And I personally guarantee your results. You’ll be totally oh-my-gosh-I’m-so-happy-I-took-that-class satisfied, or I’ll give you your money back. No questions asked.
Now’s your chance to stop spinning your wheels. I can’t tell you how much I wish I’d had something like this when I’d started:
When you finish, you will be a story idea machine.
You won’t know plotting. That’s a different course and set of skills. You won’t know how to write chapters. But you’ll know how to create the engine that powers all the rest of that. You’ll know how to create the core that makes awesome plots and chapters possible.
If you want to take this course, click the button below and contact me. I will tell you exactly how to apply.
I’m not going to be able to accept everyone who wants to take the class. I have a very strict limit on the number of students I can work with. So you need to get your application in before the deadline of midnight, December 11th.
Don’t wait!
Contact me now to get application instructions.
